Molly Hooper - (Assistant) Reanimator
by darnedchild
Summary: Sherlock Holmes learns the shocking secrets of Molly Hooper's past. *Cue dramatic music and an evil laugh*
1. Part One - Intro

_(With apologies to H.P. Lovecraft - A modern retelling of Herbert West - Reanimator. Written for 2017's Halloween at 221b - A Sherlolly Celebration.)_

 **Molly Hooper – (Assistant) Reanimator**

 **Part One - Intro**

"I'll need the results texted to me just as soon as they come in." Sherlock held the door to the small office just off the morgue open and indicated that Molly should go first.

"I know, I know, a man's alibi depends on it." Molly rolled her eyes as she slipped around the desk to stand in front of her chair. She frowned down at the large box someone had left on the middle of the desk, directly on top of the paperwork she'd been going through before Sherlock had popped in to drag her off to the lab for half an hour.

"Not really, he's guilty as the devil. But I've been waiting weeks for an excuse to use the new equipment, and this seemed as good a time as any." Sherlock waited for her to look up and share a grin with him; but the entirety of her attention seemed to be focused on the box.

He narrowed his eyes and took the sudden pallor of her skin, the way she was holding her breath, the fine tremor in her hand as she held her fingers just above the writing penned onto the corner of the shipping box. It took a second to make out the words scrawled in uneven cursive script. In the centre of the box was her name and the address for Barts. In the corner was simply "H. West" with no return address. He noted there was no postage mark to indicate where the box had been shipped from. If anything, he suspected it had been hand delivered by a carrier or possibly the sender himself.

Sherlock carefully pulled the door shut. "Molly?"

She didn't answer him.

He came around the desk and put his hand on her arm. She flinched; and when her eyes finally met his, Sherlock could see that she was terrified.

"What is it?" He gently eased her into her chair. "Look at me, sweetheart. Focus on me. Do we need to call Lestrade?"

"No! No police." Her voice was high pitched and sharp, just this side of hysterical in Sherlock's opinion.

She hadn't reacted to the unexpected (to him, most of all) endearment—one he hadn't intended to utter until it had slipped past his lips—and that worried him even more. "What's in the box?"

Molly shook her head and looked up at him. "It's a long story. You're going to want to sit down for this."


	2. Part Two – From the Dark

**Part Two – From the Dark**

Sherlock grabbed an uncomfortable chair that was mainly used as a surface to pile unfiled paperwork, and dragged it around to the same side of the desk that Molly was seated on. Once he was satisfied with their seating arrangements, facing each other with their knees nearly touching, he reached for her ice-cold hand and nodded.

"I'm ready."

Molly gripped his hand tighter, as if needing to ground herself in the tactical sensation of his touch.

"I met him ten years ago. Doctor West. Well, he was simply Herbert back then. Neither one of us was a doctor yet."

இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—

The tumour in her father's abdomen was still small when it had been discovered. Unfortunately, it was nestled against his colon and there was no guarantee that surgery would manage to get all of it. At the time, Molly didn't really understand all of the technical jargon the surgeons were throwing out, but she caught enough to know that if the cancer had spread her father wouldn't get better.

There was a clinic in the states, however; one with a surgeon who promised amazing results in cases like her father's. The decision to temporarily uproot the family to Massachusetts had been made within weeks.

Her father's condition had been the push Molly had needed to enrol at Miskatonic University in Arkham. They had one of the best medical programs in the state, and the added bonus of being less than an hour away from the small home her parents had rented.

It was during one of her anatomy classes that she met Herbert West, reluctant teaching assistant and all around anti-social arse. It was clear to Molly from the first that he'd only agreed to take the unpaid job to gain after-hour access to the donated bodies in the cadaver lab for his own research. Perversely, she had found herself listening with interest to his muttered asides during the lab practicals.

Herbert theorized that the body was a complex machine made of organic material. A machine that could, in theory, be 'restarted' after it failed. In a word, Herbert believed that he could 'cure' death.

To a woman who was watching her father undergo debilitating cancer treatments, the idea of circumventing the finality of death was incredibly enticing.

By the end of the semester, Herbert had allowed her to observe his experiments and even offer her input.

During the summer break, the two of them set up a makeshift lab in an abandoned barn. They ordered equipment off the internet, and whatever they couldn't find online they pilfered from the university.

Molly had been shocked the first time she arrived at the barn and the body on the exam table was not a deceased dog or monkey, but an actual corpse. The first she'd seen outside of her classes at Miskatonic.

"Where did that come from?"

"There was a fresh burial at the cemetery up the road. Buried at the city's expense, no friends or family in attendance. I watched the entire thing from the road. No one will miss him, Molly. We're ready to move on to a human subject, why not take the opportunity when it practically throws itself in our laps?"

That night, with the barn lit by candles and kerosene lanterns as the small gas generator was needed to power the medical equipment, Molly assisted as Herbert injected his serum into the corpse. He had instructed her to crawl atop the body and administer chest compressions in an effort to circulate the fluid and improve the chances for a successful reanimation.

Five minutes passed. Ten. At a quarter of an hour, her arms had begun to ache and tremble; but she persisted as Herbert darted about the room, adjusting knobs and dials, looking at the laptop screen with increasing frustration, grumbling and cursing with each passing minute.

Eighteen minutes after the initial injection, Herbert officially called the experiment a failure and finally allowed Molly to rest. She sank to the floor in relief, her thighs and wrists like jelly.

Herbert began to angrily rip electrodes from the corpse, then crossed the room to dump them onto a metal tray. "Why? Why didn't it work? I used the same formulation as the sixth monkey, and it came to long enough to open its eyes and screech. You heard it."

"Everyone heard it," Molly huffed, still a little out of breath. "That's why we're out in the middle of nowhere instead of the labs at Miskatonic."

He ignored her and continued to think out loud. "Perhaps we needed to use more of the serum? Was the subject not fresh enough?"

They both froze as a strange wheezing noise teased through the air.

"Herbert?" Molly whispered as she pushed herself off the ground with the splintered wood wall at her back. "Did you hear that?"

He nodded. "It's coming from the subject." He hurried to the exam table. "Bring a lantern. Quickly!"

Molly did as she was ordered, apprehension and excitement warring within her. She held the lantern high as Herbert leaned down over the corpse.

"It's breathing. It's breathing, Molly!"

Suddenly, the body jerked. The wheezing turned into an unholy shriek as the former corpse began to flail and shudder. It smacked Herbert with enough force to toss the man into the nearby, causing it to overturn and dump their laptop and several delicate pieces of equipment onto the floor with a clatter. The lantern was knocked from Molly's hand and shattered against the wall, the kerosene ignited almost immediately.

"Herbert!" Panic took over and Molly rushed to his side on pure instinct. She dragged him away from the growing flames, and together they stumbled out of the barn.

"Do you think we can get to the-" Herbert's words were drowned out by the sound and heat of the gas powered generator exploding.

They stumbled away through the nearby overgrown fields when they heard the far away bleat of approaching sirens.

News of the fire took up a quarter of the front page of the Arkham paper the next morning, but buried back on page three was a blurb about a desecrated grave in the local cemetery. The fresh dirt had been dug up and the coffin ripped apart, no sign of the body. Both the dirt and shattered coffin were covered in claw marks as if from a beast . . . or strong human hands.


	3. Part Three - The Plague-Daemon

**Part Three - The Plague-Daemon**

"Surely you don't expect me to believe that your associate brought a man back from the dead?" Sherlock scoffed.

Molly reared back as far as her chair would let her, releasing his hand in the process. "I don't expect you to believe anything, Sherlock. I'm simply telling you what happened."

He immediately regretted the harsh disbelief that had coloured his tone and words. His mouth opened as he fumbled for something to say that would convince her to continue, but Molly spoke first.

"It's-It's all right." She drew in a deep breath and gave him the barest hint of a forgiving smile. "I'd probably feel just the same if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes."

Her gaze darted toward the box for a moment, then back to him. "Unfortunately, the story is only going to get stranger from there."

இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—

The barn fire had set their research back considerably. All of their notes, several variations of the serum, their equipment . . . all of it was lost. Months of effort, years in Herbert's case, were destroyed in the flames.

Herbert had been working on his graduate studies and Molly was still working toward her doctorate when the H1N1 outbreak of 2009 reached critical levels.

The Arkham hospital was filled with the sick and dying. Some of the poor unfortunate souls were nurses and doctors themselves.

The desperate need for able hands meant the graduate students and upperclassman from the medical school were asked to volunteer at the severally understaffed hospital. Even Herbert, who had been on the outs with the dean, Dr Halsey, and been lured into service with the promise of the return of his temporarily revoked privileges in the dissection lab.

At first, Molly hadn't understood why Herbert was so enthusiastic about his time amongst the coughing population. He tended to lose interest in the recovering patients, choosing to take on the worst cases that the other doctors were more than happy to pass along.

Then he stopped her on her way out of the building after a long morning at Miskatonic and an even longer afternoon at the hospital.

"Mrs Matthias was one of yours, wasn't she?"

Molly scrunched her nose as she tried to match a face to the name. "Yeah, she's not responding to treatment, so I . . . Wait. What do you mean 'was' one of mine? What happened?"

"I believe you were with another patient when she went into arrest. Dr Wilkes called her an hour and a half ago. She's already been moved to the basement to free up her bed. You know what that means."

"Oh God." She barely had a second to mourn for the woman she hardly knew before Herbert grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the stairs. "Please tell me you aren't . . . Not here. Not now!"

But he was.

Molly kept sending furtive glances toward the door to the body coolers, convinced that someone would burst through with and catch them at any moment. Herbert rolled his eyes at her concern. "We're doctors, Molly. Very nearly. We're allowed to be here, Mrs Matthias was your patient."

"Is that-Is that why you brought me down here? To act as a cover for-for whatever it is you're doing?" She didn't wait for him to reply as she stepped closer to the drawer he'd pulled out from one of the lockers. "What are you doing, anyway? Have you managed to recreate the serum already?"

Herbert set his messenger bag on the slab and pulled a small zippered case out of it. He opened it as he answered, "Recreated, improved, and have begun testing it. Mrs Matthias will be subject number three on this round of trials."

"Three?" Molly yelped. She quickly glanced around and lowered her voice. "You never mentioned starting the tests again."

"You've had other things to focus on the last few months, haven't you?" He pulled a syringe filled with a sickly yellow-green fluid that seemed to give off a faint glow. "How is your father, by the way?"

She frowned; whether at the question or at the way Herbert had yanked the zipper of the body bag down and pushed her head to the side so he could insert the syringe needle into the corpse's neck, she wasn't sure. "He's still weak from the latest round of chemo, but the prognosis is . . . good."

He depressed the plunger and gave her a pitying look. "Good, Molly. Really?"

She wanted nothing more than to focus on something other than her father's condition. "You said this was test number three."

Herbert pulled out a second syringe and held it at the ready. "Number one was a failure. But there were observable reactions with two. Shallow respiration, eyes opened."

Molly was drawn in despite herself. "And then?"

"And then nothing." He hurried to the other side of the slab and injected the contents of the second syringe into the flesh behind the body's ear. "It's a process. You know that. Trial and error."

They both leaned over Mrs Matthias and waited. Less than a minute later, the dead woman gasped and opened her eyes. Molly swore that Mrs Matthias focused on her for one long moment with a wide-eyed, almost feral expression. Then one rotten breath escaped Mrs Matthias' lips and the body stilled for the last time.

Molly jumped when her mobile chippered with a text alert. Almost immediately, Herbert's did the same. She pulled hers from her bag and quickly read the text that had been sent to all the students that had agreed to offer assistance during the epidemic. "It's Dr Halsey. He's collapsed."

"I'm not surprised." Herbert packed away his things, carefully tucking the zippered case into his bag. "He's been coughing for days. I know Carmichael told him to rest, said he would be no good to the patients if he continued to run himself down. Any idiot worth his degree would have been able to see the man was sick, not exhausted."

"The flu?" Molly hadn't seen the dean in more than a week, and she couldn't help but wonder if she might have been able to do something to prevent his collapse. Most likely not.

"Undoubtedly," Herbert agreed. He finished zipping Mrs Matthias back into the body bag, and pushed the locker drawer shut. "Go home, Molly. With one less doctor on the rotation, our work load will only get worse over the next few days. Sleep while you can."

இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—

"He was taking advantage of the epidemic to experiment on dead bodies." Sherlock grimaced, obviously disturbed enough to restate the obvious. Something he would have pounced on with derision if someone else had done it.

"Pot, kettle." Molly rolled her eyes and waved her hands toward the morgue and the ceiling above, indicating the rest of the floors of the building. "Look where we are, right now. We're in a bloody teaching hospital, Sherlock. Bodies are donated for study all the time. How many corpses have you, personally, experimented on? And you're not even a student. Half the time it's not even for a case, just your own morbid curiosity."

He sighed and tilted his head in silent acknowledgement of her point.

இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—

Five days later, Dr Halsey aspirated in his hospital bed and died.

Herbert invited her to his flat that night, to commiserate over Halsey's death with a bottle of Scotch. She'd been tired, exhausted really; but it wasn't often that Herbert reached out for human contact, so she couldn't bring herself to turn him down.

"I'm so sorry. I know how much you looked up to him. We all did." Molly sipped her Scotch, careful to nurse the drink so that she wouldn't end up fuzzy headed and tipsy.

"He was . . . my mentor my first few years at Miskatonic. He supported my research in the beginning, when so many others scoffed in my face." Herbert set his glass to the side and pushed his chair away from the small kitchen table they'd been sitting at. "And that's why I'm going to bring him back."

Molly immediately felt ill. "No. No, no, no. You can't."

"I can and I will." He held out his hand to her. "Are you going to help me, Molly? Or are you going to let a brilliant mind like Halsey's fade away without even an attempt to save him from the dark void of death?"

"But last week? Mrs Matthias. The serum didn't work." Reluctantly, she let him take her hand and ease her out of her chair.

"That was last week. I've altered the formula again; ran computer simulation after simulation, and they all exceed my expectations. I think we can do it this time."

The way he said 'we can do it'—with such childlike hope and excitement—had her hesitantly agreeing. "Do you need me to drive us to the hospital?"

"Why?" He grinned. "I've got everything we need right here, in the spare room."

She felt the bottom drop out of her stomach again. "Everything?" Surely he didn't mean . . .

Her fears were confirmed by the sight of Dr Halsey, still in the hospital gown he'd been wearing when they had wheeled him to the basement morgue, laid out upon the bare mattress in the tiny spare room.

Herbert had already set out a tray (one that looked to have been stolen from the university canteen) with half-a-dozen syringes on the bed.

"You really think you've got it this time?" she couldn't help asking as she fumbled on a pair of latex gloves.

He smiled, pleased to see she had agreed to assist so easily. "Only one way to find out."

"Would you like to do the honours?" Herbert held the first syringe out to her. "Or would you prefer to stand by in case chest compressions are needed?"

Molly still remembered the quarter of an hour spent hovering over the body in the barn, working to manually circulate the serum through the corpse's veins. She'd been sore for days after. She took the syringe and waited for him to indicate where he wanted the first injection to be administered.

She was readying the fourth syringe, careful to stay out of Herbert's way as he straddled Halsey and prepared to begin compressions. Suddenly, the body jerked; Halsey's back arched until only his shoulders and hips touched the bed. Herbert fell to the side and rolled onto the floor. The memory of Mrs Matthias' expression before she'd died for the second time made Molly step back in fearful apprehension.

Herbert popped up, eager and undeterred. "This is it, Molly. He's coming to!"

Halsey's eyes had opened, his body relaxing into the mattress now that the initial muscular spasms were finished.

"Doctor Halsey, can you hear me? Can you speak?" Herbert reached for the older man's wrist, but Halsey yanked it back with a snarl.

Molly finally found her voice. "Sir? Are you . . . What was it like? Do you remember anything?" She was desperate to know what awaited her father when he died.

Halsey twitched and turned his face toward her. Molly took another inadvertent step back. Whatever Herbert had brought back, it wasn't Halsey. At least not as she remembered him. Instead of an advanced mind and benevolent nature, the creature on the bed was all base instinct and primal anger.

It lunged toward her with its hands curled into claws, and Molly screamed. Herbert launched himself across the bed and rolled to his feet between her and Halsey.

"The mini-fridge behind you, find something to knock him out. We need to sedate him and get him restrained. Move, Molly!"

She broke out of her stupor and pried open the cabinet to find vial after vial of drugs and chemicals that had clearly been stolen from the hospital. She heard something crash behind her, an unholy howl, and then her own yelp rang in her ears as Herbert crashed into her back. She dropped the bottle she'd been holding, crying out as the glass shattered at her feet. Something yanked at her hair, pulling her backward. Just as a strong hand wrapped around her throat, Herbert swung a metal desk lamp past her shoulder. She heard a sickening thunk as the base of the lamp connected, then Halsey's nails dug deep into her skin before releasing her. Herbert dragged her away, once again placing himself between Molly and Halsey in some strange, uncharacteristic burst of chivalry.

Blood streamed down Halsey's forehead, partially blinding the man who was literally frothing from the mouth. He snarled, spittle dribbling down his chin, then spun around and ran toward the lone window in the room. Herbert cried out "No!" as Halsey threw himself through the glass and loped out into the night.

"Jesus," Molly rasped through her abused throat. "What the hell was that?"

Herbert didn't get a chance to answer as someone began to pound on the door to his flat.

"West? Open up! Can you hear me, man? I've called the police!"

He grimaced. "Damn it. We'll never be able to explain all of this."

Molly stripped off her latex gloves and tossed them aside, her mind already shifting through options for damage control. "Answer it. Tell them-tell them a strange man knocked on the door asking for help, and then shoved his way in and-and attacked us. Stall them as long as you can. Go!"

He was able to buy her two minutes, during which she hid the remaining syringes of serum and pulled various pieces of equipment from where they'd been stored on shelves hanging on the wall. By the time the concerned upstairs neighbour pushed his way into the room, the desktop had been set up to resemble the sort of chemistry experiment one would find in a first semester class at uni. The average non-scientist would be fooled, but anyone with a background in advanced chemistry would know it was a fake with a simple glance.

Molly sat on the edge of the bed and held a clean flannel to the scratches on her neck.

"What the hell is going on?" The neighbour pushed past West and knelt at her feet. "Miss? Are you all right?"

"Yes, I . . ." She met Herbert's eyes over the neighbour's head. He nodded. Molly dropped her eyes and shuddered. "We were working, and that man . . . He must have known we're medical students and have been working at the hospital . . ."

Herbert picked up the story when she faltered. "He fell into a rage when he couldn't find the drugs he was looking for. He attacked my associate, and escaped through the window when we managed to fight him off."

The neighbour finally got a good look at the room, and slowly stood up. "What were you doing in here, West? What is all this crap?"

"She told you, Schneider. We're med students, and we've been working with patients at the hospital since the epidemic started. We're trying to create an alternative treatment for the virus. A new, more potent vaccine."

"Here? Isn't that dangerous? Are we going to get sick?" Schneider jerked back from Molly, as if he were afraid she was contagious.

As police sirens echoed through the streets of Arkham, Molly was once again reminded of that horrible night in the barn and the eerie story in the newspaper about the desecrated grave. What new horror awaited the town with the Halsey creature on the loose?

Both of the local papers were full of sensational accounts of brutal home invasions for the next two weeks. Five homes broken into over a period of twelve days. Only two survivors left to tell tales of a crazed madman with superhuman strength and no mercy. Eleven bodies torn to pieces by human hands.

The papers christened the murderer the Cannibal Killer once a loose lipped constable let slip that certain details from the crime scenes. Soft tissues had been removed from several of the bodies, teeth marks left in flesh, chunks of meat ripped from limbs. The sort of grisly tidbits people loved to read about over their morning pancakes and coffee.

He was eventually apprehended on the fourteenth night of his rampage; spotted in an alley with a dead stray cat dangling from his fist. He ran out of the alley, slamming the policeman into a brick wall hard enough to break his arm. A group of police and volunteers armed with guns and flashlights followed his trail to a forgotten tool shed hidden behind overgrown brush on someone's property. He'd made a nest for himself; stockpiling rotting meat and piles of discarded clothes and blankets obviously scavenged from dumpsters and trash cans.

Apparently, no one made the connection between the snapping, snarling madman who refused to utter a single coherent word and the recently deceased and well-respected Dr Halsey.

The Cannibal Killer was quickly deemed unfit to stand trial, and was immediately committed to a padded cell at the Arkham Asylum. In a matter of months, he had become the stuff of urban legends.

Rumours spread through the hospital about a misplaced body, but no one in the morgue would admit to anything (and risk losing their jobs). Someone was laid to rest in Halsey's grave, but Molly knew it hadn't been the good doctor.


	4. Part Four - Six Shots by Midnight

**Part Four - Six Shots by Midnight**

"Christ, Molly. Why didn't you tell me?" He ran a hand through his hair, ruffling his curls into the sort of disarray she would have normally found adorable.

"What was I supposed to say?" she scoffed, followed by a quick inhale that was almost a sob. "Oh, by the way, I had a friend in uni who discovered the secret to reanimating dead flesh. Unfortunately, the process had a rather inconvenient side effect of turning the test subjects into flesh-eating ghouls. How, exactly, should I have tried to work that into a casual conversation, Sherlock?" Molly's was voice growing shriller with each new word; which she seemed to realize because she clamped her lips together to hold in whatever nervous noise was trying to break free.

"I see your point." He slumped, his head coming to rest on the back of the chair so he could stare up at the tiled ceiling. "That's all of it, though. Right?" Sherlock lifted his head at her silence. "Right, Molly?"

Her skin had, somehow, gone even paler than before. He began to worry that she was going to be sick all over her desk.

She winced. "No."

Acting purely on instinct, he slid from the chair and knelt at her feet. He grabbed both of her hands, which were far too cold to the touch for his liking. In his most calming voice he said, "Take a deep breath for me. Now let it go. And another one. In. And out. There we go, that's my girl."

"Your what?" Molly blinked, her fearful expression momentarily morphed into bewilderment.

"My . . . We'll talk about that later." Now that she had regained some of her colour, Sherlock sat back on his heels. "All right. Tell me the rest."

இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—

The experiments stopped after the Halsey incident. Or, more likely, Herbert had simply stopped asking for Molly's assistance. Not that she would have given it.

Not then, at any rate.

Molly's father's condition continued to worsen. Eventually the American doctor told them there was nothing more he could do. Her father wanted to spend his last few months in his familiar family home, so the Hoopers returned to Lincolnshire. Molly was relieved to leave Miskatonic University (and Herbert West) behind.

After her father died, she redoubled her efforts to finish her schooling. Her father had told her that his greatest wish had been for her to become Doctor Hooper, and while he wouldn't be around to see it, she made sure his wish was fulfilled. There were some who called her heartless and cold—her mother included—because she took no more than a week off when he died, just long enough to help make arrangements for and to attend his funeral, but she had a mission. No one understood that this was her way to grieve. Her penance for not being able to save him.

Her first job after becoming a doctor was at a small medical practice in Louth. It took months, but she eventually came out of her shell and her old personality broke free. She made friends with the other clinic staff and Milly at the diner.

One dreary day the next spring, she pushed through the front door of the clinic, her usual friendly greeting for the young receptionist dying on her lips at the sight of Herbert West leaning against the counter.

"And there she is," Herbert laughed. "I was just about to leave a note for you."

"How-how did you-Why?" she stuttered.

He quickly interrupted her with a sharp glance at the receptionist who was watching them, obviously hoping for a juicy bit of gossip about the newest doctor. "Surprise you? I thought it would be more fun if I didn't call ahead."

Which would have been a nice trick, considering he shouldn't have had her number. Or her address. She'd cut off all ties to him and nearly everyone else from the States when she'd left.

"Well, I am definitely surprised." And it wasn't particularly pleasant.

"I've a meeting this afternoon, but how about dinner tonight? We've got a lot to catch up on." Herbert offered a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes.

Over a too-large portion of Shephard's Pie that evening, Herbert told her that he'd kept an eye on her academic progress since she'd left. He'd even managed to read her thesis. When he had heard that one of the partners in her practice was getting ready to retire just as he was looking to make a change and leave Arkham, Herbert decided it was clearly a matter of fate.

"I'm sorry? Are you saying you're replacing Doctor Masters?"

"Not replacing, per se." He set aside his own plate of barely touched food. "I'll be taking over his caseload over the next month or two, on a probationary basis, to see if I'll be a good fit in your quaint little community."

She got the impression he was mocking either her village or her boss. Or both.

"So, why did you leave Massachusetts?" People didn't just drop everything and move to Louth on a whim.

"I told you, Molly, I was ready for a change."

She had resolved to hop on-line as soon as she got back to her tiny cottage and look for any strange news out of Arkham over the last few months, and was relieved to see nothing of note had been reported.

Months later, Herbert had settled into the practice with little trouble. He was extremely competent as a doctor, but had little to no bedside manner. There were the occasional mutterings about his abrasive nature over the reception desk.

He'd purchased a small house for a song, simply because it shared a fence with the cemetery and therefore was rumoured to be haunted. He'd hired workmen to complete much needed repairs around the long empty home and to enlarge the small cellar into a workspace.

It took a while, but Molly eventually found herself warming toward her old friend once more, and falling into old habits. At first it was just reminiscing about their former research (while carefully avoiding any mention of Doctor Halsey's death and subsequent reawakening). Then it became shared meals and looking over a few notes to try to figure out where they had gone wrong, purely a hypothetical exercise of course. And then the odd evening down in the cellar, messing about with reagents and new formulas.

Before she knew it, Molly was pulled back in. Rather than risk another Halsey incident, they concentrated their work on a much smaller scale, the overly abundant rat population. Not even the entire rat. Miraculously, Herbert's latest serum was capable of reanimating dismembered limbs, organs, even the severed head of a particularly large rodent specimen.

"Think of it, Molly. We could revolutionize transplant procedures. No more wasting time waiting for a suitable organ donor to get caught in a traffic accident. Part out a donor corpse, inject the serum, then put it all in cold storage until needed."

His enthusiasm was infectious, but she couldn't help but wince at his phrasing. "Part out? You'll need to work on your wording if you hope to ever convince the medical community to accept your work."

Herbert rolled his eyes. "On the whole, most of them are feeble minded sheep anyway. Sticking to what they were taught without a thought toward innovation or advancements."

"Be that as it may, you'll need funding if you want to take this large scale." It would do him no good to alienate the people who cut the checks.

"Trust me, my dear, there will always be someone searching for the secret to immortality and willing to pay for it." He sighed as he stared at their latest experiment. "There are so many variables that need to be calculated. Trials with rats won't be enough for us to go public. If only we had a human specimen to work with."

Molly shook her head with a grimace. "I am not going to help you dig up another body. I know these people, Herbert. I work with them, they wave to me when I walk down the main street, I talk to them at the diner."

He sighed and agreed, a tad too quickly for her comfort.

Suddenly the doorbell echoed through the ground floor of the house and through the open door to the cellar. They looked at each other, then up as if they thought they would be able to see through the floorboards.

"Who's that?" Molly asked.

"Probably one of the yokels, asking if I could come 'out to the farm and help Bessie birth a calf', as if I were a common veterinarian. You answer it, tell them I'm busy doing . . . anything." He waved her off. Molly stuck her tongue out at his back, before trudging up the stairs.

It wasn't a rancher worried about his cattle. It was one of the men who worked at city hall. He looked nervous, and the stench of alcohol and cigarette smoke assaulted her nose as soon as she pushed the screen door open.

"Hey, Frank."

He seemed surprised to see her. "Uh, hello, Miss Molly. Is, uh, Dr West here?"

Molly wondered yet again why everyone insisted on calling her by her first name when Herbert was still known as Dr West. "He's a bit busy at the moment. Is there something I can help you with?"

He opened and closed his mouth a few times, then sharply nodded his head as if he'd come to a decision of some sort. "You gotta come help, there's been a-an accident."

She immediately straightened from where she'd been leaning against the door frame. "What happened?"

"At the pub, there was . . . He fell in the basement. Banged his head up pretty bad. There's a lot of blood, ma'am. I don't know if he'll make it."

It was a widely known but unspoken secret that certain men from the village liked to gather in the basement of the pub and pummel themselves silly on a semi-regular basis. She didn't believe the injured man had fallen on his own, not for a minute.

Molly hurried to the cellar door and called down to Herbert, "I need to head out, someone's hurt. I don't have my bag with me, where's yours?"

Herbert stomped up the stairs, visibly irritated at the interruption and the loss of his assistant. "In the hall closet. What do you mean, someone's hurt?"

She quietly filled him in as she pulled Herbert's medical bag from the shelf in the closet, including her suspicions that the injury was boxing related. "Frank thinks he might not live."

"Interesting. I suppose we'll be the judge of that, won't we?" Herbert took the bag from Molly's hands and gestured for her to precede him out the front door. "Tell me, Frank. Who is it who . . . fell?"

Frank led the way toward the cars parked in the short gravel drive. "You wouldn't know him, just a bloke who's been hanging around the village, looking for work the last few weeks. You've probably never even seen him. Geoff bought him a few drinks, to be friendly. You know."

So drunk and clumsy was going to be the story the boys at the pub were going to tell, Molly thought as she settled into the front seat next to Herbert. They followed Frank's car into the village, although Herbert drove around to the alley behind the pub and parked there.

Frank had been right. By the time they arrived, the drifter had stopped breathing; which was probably for the best as she could see brain matter through the fractured skull. "This wasn't just a fall," she whispered to Herbert as they examined the massive body of a man who was clearly used to hard manual labour.

He grunted in reply, then stood up and wiped his hands against his shirt, leaving a smear of blood against the white material. "Frank, a word, if you please."

She watched the two men move to a corner of the room. The handful of other village men stood to the side, whispering to themselves. _Probably making sure they had their stories straight_ , she thought.

Minutes later, Herbert returned to her side and Frank crossed the room to speak with his friends. Some of them gave her and Herbert a look, then the entire lot of them hurried up the stairs.

"What's going on?"

"They're going to their respective homes to pretend that none of this happened, and I have agreed that we will deal with our friend here out of the goodness of our hearts and to protect the reputations of several of those fine gentlemen." Herbert looked around and found a tarp, which he quickly laid down next to the body. "Help me roll him on to this."

"I'm sorry, we're what?" Molly questioned, even as she did as he'd asked and tried to help push the heavy body onto the tarp.

"We're taking him back to the house. If you remember, I was just lamenting the lack of human specimens to test our new serum on. Ask and you shall receive."

It took considerable effort to haul the dead weight up the stairs into the kitchen and out the back door of the pub. Molly spent the entire drive back to Herbert's house praying that they weren't pulled over for a traffic stop, and that no one would ask to look in the trunk.

By the time they dragged the corpse into the house (literally dragged, because Molly was surprisingly strong for her size but the drifter had outweighed her by more than seven stone), they were both tired. Rather than risk injuring themselves trying to get their burden down to the cellar, Herbert brought the absolutely necessary equipment up to the kitchen front hall where they had dumped the tarp wrapped drifter.

"Shouldn't we tie him up or something?" Molly worried her lower lip as she stared at the large body splayed out on the floor. She still remembered Halsey and the damage he'd done before he'd been caught and contained.

"The rats were docile enough, I don't think that's necess-" Herbert slowly stopped talking as Molly narrowed her eyes and glared. "I've got some rope in the shed."

Unfortunately, the serum didn't work. They waited nearly thirty minutes, used six vials of the glowing liquid, chest compressions, everything they could think of . . . and nothing.

In all honesty, Molly was relieved that the experiment had been a failure. The work they'd been doing in the cellar could someday save lives. How many people died waiting on a transplant list every year?

But that, the corpse currently bound in rope and anchored to the radiator in Herbert's sitting room . . . That had the potential to become dangerous in the blink of an eye.

They'd worked hard to modify the serum's formula. None of the rodent body parts they'd managed to reanimate had shown any signs of aggression, not even the severed head. She'd let their small successes and Herbert's enthusiasm override her cautious nature. Thank God no one had been forced to pay the price for their hubris this time.

Herbert sat back on his heels and grimaced. "What is it? What variables are we overlooking?"

"Herbert."

He tapped his fingers against the drifter's still chest and continued to think out loud. "How long would you say he was dead? Those buffoons had to stand around until one of them had the bright idea to summon a doctor. Five minutes lost there, if I'm being generous."

"Herbert."

"Another thirty for Frank to get in his car and drive here, he wouldn't have sped because he didn't want the constable to have any reason to pull him over. Twenty-five for us to get to the pub. Then another-"

"Herbert!" Molly nearly shouted. "Stop."

"But don't you see? It's the decomposition. He's been dead three, possibly four hours before we began." He hopped up and gesticulated wildly. "The rats were all fresh, still warm when we dismembered them. No chance for decomp to set in before we injected the serum."

Molly used an end table to slowly pull herself up. Her muscles ached from hauling so much dead weight around. "We can't keep doing this."

He frowned, looking at her as if he didn't even recognize her, and then his expression cleared and he nodded. "You're right. We've been coming at this from the wrong direction."

That hadn't been what she'd meant at all, but she was tired and they still had to figure out what to do with the dead man. "Do I even want to know what you're talking about?"

"We have to stop the deterioration of the brain matter. I'm almost positive that is what has been causing the regression to primitive instincts."

"And violent," Molly felt the need to remind him.

He waved her off. "The important thing is that the serum works."

"We don't really know that," Molly quickly interjected.

Herbert ignored her. "Clearly, the next step is to find a way to slow down, or even stop, decomposition."

That seemed like a bit of a leap, but if it meant no more cannibalistic half-zombies then Molly was all for it. "In the meantime, what do we do with him?" She nodded toward the body.

After a moment's thought, Herbert gestured toward the tarp they'd abandoned when they first tied the drifter's corpse up. "I'll wrap him up, you get the shovel out of the shed."

இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—

"Considering what you told me earlier, that could have gone much worse," Sherlock offered.

"Oh, no. We're not done." Molly rubbed at her forehead. "Not even close."

"Damn." Sherlock stood up from the floor and took her hand. "Let's move to the sofa than. I'm tired of kneeling."

Once they were settled on the small loveseat, he put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close enough that she could tuck her head under his chin. He thought it might be easier for her to talk if she didn't have to look him in the eye.

"Herbert dug a shallow grave behind one of the mausoleums. Half the village still treated the cemetery as if it were haunted so there wasn't much chance that anyone would be wandering around the place and stumble across it." She took a deep breath and reached for his free hand, tucking her fingers between his. "For two days everything was fine. And then the Meynard boy went missing."

"Fuck," Sherlock whispered under his breath. He felt her tense, and held her hand even tighter to show her that he wasn't going to run off. "Did . . . Did they find him?"

"Yeah." Molly's voice broke. She had to take a minute to compose herself. "In the meantime, his mother couldn't handle the stress and worry. Sherry had always been high strung and delicate. Bad heart. She collapsed in a fit of hysteria, and Herbert happened to be the doctor on call that day. He went out to their house, thinking that he'd be able to sedate her a bit, calm her down. Maybe convince Ralph to drive her into the city so she could be admitted to hospital. She had a heart attack while arguing with them both that she wasn't leaving until they found her little boy. Herbert couldn't save her."

She tilted her head up. He could feel the brush of her eyelashes against his jaw as she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. "Ralph tried to beat the crap out of him, said Herbert didn't try hard enough. Pretty sure the only thing that saved Herbert was the constable coming by to check in with a progress report on the search."

She sniffled, and Sherlock knew that whatever was coming was going to be bad. Very bad.

"Gossip being what it is in a small community, I headed out to Herbert's that evening. I wanted to make sure he was okay. He answered the door with a revolver in his hand. I have no idea how he managed to get his hands on one, or how long he'd had it. He said he had thought I was Ralph, come to finish the job. I'd barely been there twenty minutes when someone started pounding on the kitchen door, hard enough to make it shake."

Even though he knew the answer already, he still asked, "Ralph?"

Molly made a noise that was a cross between a choke and a sob. "I wish. Herbert ripped open the door, revolver pointed at his visitor. It was the drifter, hunched over low enough that his knuckles almost scraped against the broken concrete step outside the door. I remember thinking he looked like a gorilla. And then I realized that was because he was covered in dirt and grave moss and-and viscera. He had, hanging out of his mouth he had-"

Sherlock rubbed his cheek against the top of her head. "Shh, it's okay. You don't have to say it."

He felt her nod. "Thank you. Herbert emptied his revolver into it. All six bullets. One right in the forehead."

"How did he explain any of it? Surely the others had to have said something. The men in the pub?"

"When Frank asked, Herbert told him there were cases of people being clinically dead and then waking up on the autopsy table. The drifter must not have been truly dead when he buried him. And when he woke up and dug himself out, the extensive brain damage from the 'fall' must have made him go berserk. Frank backed off once Herbert mentioned the incident in the pub."

Molly sighed and sniffled again. "Ralph laid his wife and son to rest on the same day. There wasn't really a need for the second casket, but they buried one anyway."


	5. Part Five - The Scream of the Dead

**A/N:** Thank you to the Guest reviewer who alerted me to the fact that I'd managed to upload a totally unrelated fic instead of the corrected version of Part Five of Reanimator. Sorry for that.

 **Part Five - The Scream of the Dead**

It was immediately clear to Molly that she needed to get out of Louth. Unfortunately, she couldn't just pack her things and run after the Meynard funerals, no matter how much she wanted to. There wasn't enough in her savings to live off of for any prolonged period of time, so finding a new job was a priority.

Two months later, she managed to secure interviews at a pair of hospitals and arranged to spend a week in London.

By the time she came home, she had accepted an offer at St. Bartholomew's.

Rather than let Herbert find out she was leaving through the village grapevine, Molly thought it would be best to drive out to his place. She hadn't seen nor spoken to him outside of the practice in over a month, but something compelled her to break the news to him in person.

His car was parked beside the house, but no one answered the door when she knocked. However, she could hear the muted sounds of "Mars" coming from somewhere inside. Herbert was a fan of Holst, and would often listen to the Planets while he worked in the lab; which meant odds were fairly good that he was home.

Molly went around to the house, and knocked on the back door. This time she heard the music stop, and after a moment she could see Herbert step through the cellar door into the kitchen.

He invited her in. "I wasn't expecting you back until tomorrow. Where did you go, again? Off to visit your mom, right?"

He wasn't usually the sort who made ideal chit-chat, so his behaviour began to put her on guard. Clearly he was trying to distract her from something. "No. I mean, yes, I did see mum for a brief visit; but I was actually in London. For a job interview. I've, uh, been offered a position in pathology at St. Barts." She bit her lip and waited to see how he was going to react.

"That's . . . Congratulations." He smiled, but it didn't come anywhere near his eyes.

"Thank you." They stared at each other for a moment, and it was tense and almost combative. She felt the need to fill the awkward silence. "So, what have you been doing lately?"

Molly quickly regretted her question.

"Are you certain you really want to know?"

If anything, she was certain that was the very last thing she wanted. Her eyes darted to the door he'd come through. "What's in the cellar?" She tried to make it sound as if she wasn't dreading the answer. She failed.

He gestured for her to go down the stairs ahead of him. Against her better judgement, she did.

On the second-hand autopsy table in the centre of the room was a body.

"Where did you find this one?" It was telling that her first response was along the line of 'Not again' rather than shock and outrage at finding yet another corpse hidden away in Herbert's home.

He hurried past her, fairly bouncing in excitement. "He came to me, and at the most fortuitous time. He's a door-to-door salesman, which I didn't even think existed anymore, but there you go." Herbert patted the body's foot. "He looked worn out, and you're always reminding me that I should make more of an effort to be affable, so I invited him in for a glass of water and a sit down. Poor man had a heart attack while I was in the kitchen."

Molly opened her mouth but nothing came out. She reached up to rub her temples and tried again. "And you just kept him here? Someone's going to miss him."

He scoffed as he pulled a vial of something she didn't recognize out of the mini-fridge. It wasn't the serum they'd been working on. That liquid had been more of a neon yellow-green that almost seemed to glow. This was electric blue, and looked as if it had come straight out of a bottle of window cleaner.

"No one has come looking for him in the last week and a half. Besides, he's dead. It's not as if he's going to mind. As a matter of fact, he'd probably be proud that his sacrifice is leading toward a scientific breakthrough."

"A week and a half?" She got stuck on that detail. Almost against her will, Molly found herself leaning over the body. There was no way that he had been dead for that long. His skin tone was still healthy, no visual signs of rigor or decomp. He would have looked as if he were merely sleeping if he'd been breathing.

Herbert nodded and held the vial out to her. "I told you we needed to try a different approach. Think of it as a new form of embalming fluid. He was here when he died, so I was able to stop the deterioration process almost immediately."

Molly didn't know if she should be impressed or horrified. Or both. Probably both.

He reached for the syringe of the reanimation serum that was already prepared and waiting next to the salesman's body. "You are just in time to witness his resurrection. Would you like to do the honours?"

She shook her head and took a step back. "No. Thank you." The polite words seemed at odds with the situation, but the social niceties had been ingrained in her for so long that they just slipped out.

This time it only took a few minutes for the first signs of movement. It started with a twitch of the toes, then muscles rippled and spasmed. The salesman's eyes fluttered open. Then his lips began to move, as if they were forming words.

Reluctantly, Molly edged half a step closer, until she could hear wheezing breaths that passed across his lips. His eyes focused on her for a second, then rolled until they alighted on Herbert. Suddenly the salesman began to twitch and his hands curled into claws.

"What is it?" she asked him. "Does it-does it hurt?"

"Noooo," the corpse whispered. Initially, she thought he was answering her; but then he reached for Herbert and his voice rose in panicked anger. "No, don't come near me. What are you doing with that needle? Don't touch me. Don't touch me!" That's when she realized he wasn't reaching for the other man, he was holding up his hands to try to ward Herbert off.

இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—

Sherlock inhaled sharply through his nose. "Did he hurt you?"

West was clearly a psychopath. Up until that moment, Molly had gone along with his madness. But who knew how unpredictable he would have become if she had challenged him.

There had been a lot of deaths, but none of them had been at the direct hands of West. An actual murder, however, wasn't something she would have been able to justify for the sake of science.

"No. He let me leave, and as I hurried up the stairs I heard the salesman scream and then silence. I don't which was worse."

"Then what did you do?"

Molly looked up at him with wide eyes, and then she shrugged. "I ran. I packed up whatever would fit in my car and I ran that night. I never went back."


	6. Part Six - The Horror From the Shadows

**Part Six - The Horror From the Shadows**

"That was years ago. The more time passed, the easier it was to pretend it had all been a nightmare. But always, always in the back of my mind was the memory of what he'd done. What _we_ had done. Like a mouldering pile of leaves that hid a festering corpse, just waiting to be discovered by some innocent child in the forest."

 _That was oddly poetic, in a macabre sort of way_ , Sherlock thought.

"So much had changed since Louth, I'd practically become another person. For the first time since before my father got sick, I thought I actually belonged somewhere. I made friends, I excelled at my job, I . . . met you." Molly closed her eyes and looked away, visibly embarrassed at her last admission.

He couldn't let her continue to think her feelings were strictly one-sided, but now was not the time to get into declarations of _feelings_ and _intentions_ and the nonsense that most couples felt the need to define before they could be together. He tucked his fingers under her chin and drew her face back toward him. "No more of that, there's no need to hide from me anymore."

Her features softened and he saw the barest tilt of her lips as she almost smiled, then her eyes cut to the box on the desk and the fear returned to her face. As cold dread washed over him, he knew that her story wasn't over.

இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—

The day Sherlock jumped off the roof of Barts was one of the most nerve-wracking and, frankly, terrifying days of Molly's life. Even the usually infallible Mycroft Holmes had been disturbingly pale when he'd pulled her aside to confirm (for the third time) that she knew what was expected from her.

She had two jobs.

The first was the easiest of the two. She'd done most of her work during the long night before. Mycroft's people would have tracked down the correct John Doe eventually; but time was of the essence and Molly was far more familiar with the ends and outs of the various hospital and morgue databases. She'd located the right file, Mycroft had dispatched a small team to liberate the corpse from where it had been tucked away in another hospital's cold storage. Molly didn't know how they did it, and she didn't care to ask.

Once the double was smuggled in through the loading bay, she'd taken charge. Someone delivered a duplicate of Sherlock's suit and coat. By the time she was done with the corpse, it would have fooled Sherlock himself . . . from a distance.

The second assignment had been much more distressing. Neither Sherlock nor Mycroft wanted her to be seen anywhere near the location of Sherlock's probable 'suicide'. They wanted no one to notice her, to even consider that she might have been involved. Which meant once events were set in motion, she had to wait and lurk in the basement morgue, as if she had no clue about the confrontation that was brewing on the roof.

Because of that, she didn't hear about Jim's death until Mycroft mentioned it in passing; telling her that the body recovered from the roof would be transported to another location that evening, and until then it would be in everyone's best interest if no one else were to become aware of the 'unplanned for complication'.

It was late afternoon before she felt it was safe enough to leave the faux-Sherlock alone and unguarded. Rather than heading toward the breakroom to get a cup of coffee to help keep her awake and functioning after her long and stressful night, she slipped down an empty hall toward the room where Jim's body was stored.

Molly paused and steady herself with her hand against the cool metal door.

Jim Moriarty had been a horrible man, but he'd also spent a few hours cuddled up with her cat and Toby had liked him. He'd listened to her talk, really listened. In retrospect, he'd probably been gathering ammunition against Sherlock; but at the time, he had made her feel important and interesting.

Was she really ready to see him laying out on a slab?

The door was already swinging inward when she realized it should have been locked. There was no way Mycroft would have been distracted enough to let a detail like that slide. She quickly wrapped her fingers around the edge of the door and stopped its progress.

The normally bright overhead fluorescent flickered and cast shadows along the walls, making it even harder to see any of the room through the thumb's width opening she had made.

Coming from inside was a trio of voices. One she did not recognize, but the other two? They made her heart stutter in paralyzing fear.

"What. Did. You do. To me?" Even with the stilted, unnatural speech pattern, Molly would have recognized Jim's deceptively soft voice anywhere.

She wasn't the only one who was scared, judging from the audible tremble coming from the unknown man. "Exactly what you told us to do, boss. You said that if anything went south, West should use his zombie juice and bring you back."

Even before Jim could reply, she heard Herbert speak up. "I really wish you would stop calling it that."

"Yeah, well I really wish you would fu-"

"ENOUGH!" That was most definitely Jim Moriarty. "I obviously. Changed my mind." The earlier choppiness of his speech had begun to smooth out, as if he were becoming used to operating his voice and vocal cords again.

She could hear movement from inside the room. Suddenly Herbert came into her field of vision as he headed toward the worn leather bag sitting on a wheeled tray near the wall. Molly recognized the bag, she'd given it to him ages ago. Back when they were both still in Arkham, Massachusetts. He called over his shoulder as he began to pack up the things he'd had spread around the tray. "Then you should have thought to text that information to us before you got your brains scrambled. We're not mind readers."

She gasped. While she'd only seen the nicer, fake side of Jim in person, she had heard enough from Sherlock, John, and Greg to know that Herbert was treading on thin ground.

"Watch your mouth, West. You're not as indispensable as you think you are," from the unknown man again.

"I'm . . . hungry." The other two men may not have heard Jim mutter to himself, but Molly did. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled and the urge to run and hide was nearly overpowering.

Herbert turned with a sneer on his lips. The way his eyes tracked something, Molly knew that at least one of the other men was on the move. "What is that supposed to mean?"

"We know you didn't come up with that shit on your own. You had help."

Molly gasped. She saw Herbert stiffen, then his gaze darted toward the door she was hiding behind for just a split second before he purposely stared straight ahead.

The third man continued to talk. "When—not if—when you stop being useful, we'll just have to track down your helper and give him your notes. I'm sure he'll be able to figure it out from there."

"You'll never find _him,_ Moran." Herbert stressed the last word, and she knew that he was fully aware of who was lurking in the hall. He knew she was there and he was leading Jim and the other man as far away from her identity as he could. "He's probably long dead. You know how the earlier trials ended. Halsey has been heavily restrained in Arkham Asylum, and he's still managed to add a nurse or four to his body count over the years."

"Now, now, Seb. Don't rile up Dr West. However, you do make a good point about the replaceability of people."

"Boss?" Seb asked. His angry tone had morphed back into fear.

"I've invested a lot of time and money into the Doctor's research. He's come a long way, but the process isn't perfect yet. Wouldn't you agree, Doctor?"

Herbert silently nodded.

"I'm here," Jim continued. "I'm walking and talking, and clearly articulate even with a gaping hole in the back of my head. What can we do about that, West?"

"Unfortunately, some of the brain tissue is gone, but you seem to be functioning well enough without it. As you said, walking and talking." Herbert quickly tossed out some options. "We could cover it, though. Adhere a plate or even part of another skull over the exit wound. A skin graft, perhaps. Add a hair piece."

"See, Seb? He's still useful. And so are you," Jim purred. Even without seeing him, Molly knew something bad was coming.

"Thanks?" It seemed Seb was also aware that something was wrong.

"Useful, but replaceable. There are so many waiting in the wings, just itching to step up into your place at my side, dear Sebastian. And right now, I am so very, very hungry."

Sebastian's scream was cut off before it had a chance to really begin. Molly could hear the wet, horrifically obscene noises of something organic being ripped apart just on the other side of the door.

Herbert met her eyes and shook his head. A nonverbal warning not to interfere. He jerked his chin, indicating that she should leave, but she couldn't seem to make her feet work. Something rolled across the floor to come to a rest at his feet.

The decapitated head of Sebastian Moran stared up at Herbert, eyes and mouth still open wide in shock.

"Give him some of your serum, Doctor. When I'm done with my meal, you can have this half, too. Let's see what happens, shall we?"

இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—

"I tried to tell Mycroft, but I couldn't get a hold of him for hours. And I didn't-I didn't know what to say. I've never told anyone about Herbert and the experiments before." Molly stood up and began to pace. "But I was going to do it. Jim had to be stopped, and that wouldn't happen if Mycroft's people didn't understand what they were up against."

Sherlock watched her, tempted to reach out for her every time she came within touching distance.

"In the end, it didn't matter. When I finally got him on the phone, he cut me off. Said he was already aware that Moriarty was missing. He'd seen the security footage, seen what I'd witnessed. I could tell that he didn't, couldn't really believe his own eyes. I think he thought it might have been a trick, but they were already gathering information on Herbert. He didn't seem to realize how much of a part I'd played in all of it."

Molly looked down at him and worried her lower lip between her teeth for a moment. "He figured it out soon enough, though."


	7. Part Seven - The Tomb-Legions

**Part Seven - The Tomb-Legions**

" _Mycroft_ knew?" Sherlock snarled. "He knew about West. He knew Zombie Moriarty was loose in London, and no one thought to fucking mention it to me?" He absolutely hated it when Mycroft knew things he didn't, especially when it was something about Molly or Moriarty. He saw the way she flinched at his vehemence and made a conscious effort to tone it down. "I understand why _you_ felt you couldn't tell me any of this before. But what is Mycroft's excuse?"

She threw up her hands. "Probably because he didn't think it mattered anymore. As far as we knew, the problem had been dealt with." Molly slumped back with her hip against the desk, then jerked upright and away from the box that hard started all of this.

He got tired of watching her shuffle around the room and pulled her back down the sofa next to him. "What do you mean, dealt with?"

She collapsed against his arm, and turned her face into his shoulder. He had to strain to hear her when she spoke again. "Mycroft said you needed to give one hundred percent of your attention to your mission, and any distraction could get you killed. By the time you came back, he been dead a long time. Really dead."

"Moriarty?" Just what exactly had happened in those two years he'd been gone?

"And Herbert." Molly lifted her head to look at him, her eyes pleading with him to understand. "Both of them. All of them."

Sherlock froze. "All of them?"

இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—

Less than four months after Sherlock's fall, the elder Holmes brother showed up at her house. At first, she had been certain that he'd come to tell her that something horrible had happened to Sherlock.

He must have read her thoughts in her expression because the first words out of his mouth were, "That's not why I'm here, Miss Hooper. He's well enough."

That told her nothing, and yet everything she needed to continue to hope. "If it's not . . . Then why are you here?" Mycroft Holmes wasn't the sort to just pop in for a social visit. Still, if she'd been around, Molly's mother would have told her she was being unforgivably rude. "Forgive me, can I get you anything? A cup of tea? I've got some biscuits. Nothing homemade, I'm afraid. Just some chocolate ones I picked up from the corner-"

"I'm fine," Mycroft sharply interrupted her rambling. "Thank you for the offer."

He stared at her for a long moment, and she stared back. Finally, he took a deep breath. "I am in need of your assistance, Miss Hooper." He pointed toward her hall closet with the end of his umbrella. "You may wish to take a coat, where we're going can get quite cold."

"I can't go anywhere," Molly automatically objected. "I've got a shift at the hospital in an hour."

He raised a single eyebrow and she knew that her shift had already been reassigned, long before Mycroft had rung her doorbell.

"Where are we going?"

There was the eyebrow again.

"Right. Don't know why I even bothered asking. Do I get to know why I'm being abducted, or is that a secret too?" She stomped the short distance to the closet and yanked her coat off the hanger.

"You aren't being abducted. You are willingly, and with full consent, agreeing to join me on a jaunt to the country. We've a mutual acquaintance who is quite eager to speak with you."

She ran through the mental list of people they might both know and quickly discarded most of them. "Herbert?"

For the third time, Mycroft deployed that annoying eyebrow.

இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—

"He took you to see West? Had he lost his mind?" Sherlock was going to murder his brother.

Molly put her hands over both of his, and he realized he'd clinched them into fists in his lap. She ran her thumb across the back of one hand, attempting to sooth him. "He had his reasons."

இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—

Herbert had been hidden away in a nondescript farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. It reminded her a bit of the house in Louth at first.

Then she was escorted past the warmly decorated front sitting room, through the kitchen with its still warm Aga, and into the most intimidatingly high-tech room she'd ever seen outside of the telly. It put the security room at Barts to shame. A bank of computer screens and CCTV monitors soundlessly flickered along one wall. Two men sat at a pair of keyboards, both in black uniforms with no visible means of identification. They both turned when she and Mycroft entered. One of them quickly stood and addressed them. "Sir. Ma'am." Molly noted that he had a firearm tucked into a holster at his side.

They both did. Molly suspected everyone in the house was probably armed, even the friendly looking couple who had welcomed them when they'd arrived.

"Anything to report?" Mycroft leaned toward the monitors and squinted as he studied the empty corridors on most screens and the man who was pacing the perimeter of a small room furnished with a bed, desk and chair on the one in the upper corner.

"No, sir. He's been in his room most of the day. Would you like me to turn up the sound?"

Mycroft shook his head. "That won't be necessary. We're going down."

The other man flicked his eyes toward her. "She, uh, doesn't have clearance for that. Sir."

Mycroft leaned back on his heels, both hands holding the handle of his umbrella as he regarded the speaker. "She does now, Jenkins."

Jenkins used a hand scanner to open the lift doors, then gestured for Molly and Mycroft to enter ahead of him. The ride in the lift was brief and silent. Just the three of them silently standing there, everyone carefully avoiding making any eye contact with anyone else. She was tempted to cough, just to see what would happen. The lift came to a stop somewhere below the house, and when the doors opened she realized they were in some sort of cold war era underground bunker.

They moved down a corridor and stopped in front of a door. Jenkins knocked in a pattern that was vaguely familiar. Something from Holst? She fully expected him to pull punch in a code on the keypad next to the door, but he simply stepped back.

Jenkins must have seen her expression. "Dr West prefers to limit physical access to his quarters. Other than emergency override, the keypad is for his sole use." She caught the annoyance in his tone.

It wasn't difficult to interpret that as 'He's a paranoid bastard, and none of us like him. We could get in there if we wanted to, but we're playing nice as long as the command chain says we have to.'

Molly eventually heard the sound of a lock disengaging from inside the room, then another. Seconds later, the door eased open and Herbert cautiously peeked out.

He brightened as soon as he saw her. "Molly! I wasn't sure you'd come, after . . . everything."

"To be honest, I probably wouldn't have if I'd had any real choice." She threw a pointed look in Mycroft's direction.

Herbert nodded as if he had expected her answer. "I know you're not happy with me."

"Not happy? That doesn't come close, Herbert! I don't even know where to start." Molly threw up her hands.

"Moriarty, perhaps," Mycroft helpfully deadpanned.

"Yes! Thank you." Mycroft was undeniably a stuffy pain in the arse, but he just earned himself a tic in the 'almost tolerable' column. "Moriarty. How could you?"

"I told you once, Molly. There will always be someone willing to pay for the secret of immortality. Jim Moriarty was willing to pay more than anyone else. A lot more. And he offered me the freedom to continue my work on my own terms." Herbert actually seemed to believe that was perfectly acceptable justification for what had happened.

She scoffed, "That's it. I'm done here."

"Wait, no!" Herbert looked to Mycroft with panic in his eyes before turning back to her and almost begging, "Please. You can't leave. I need your help."

"No." She shook her head, her lips set in a stubborn line as she took a step back. "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me . . . a lot, and-and I'm an idiot. I am not getting drawn back in to this insanity."

Mycroft cleared his throat and Molly knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he was about to lose any progress he'd made toward not being a complete and utter wanker. "A word, Miss Hooper."

She followed him off to the side, just out of earshot of Jenkins and Herbert. What followed was an intense negotiation. It started with a calm request of her assistance; followed by an eye roll on her part. An firm appeal to her loyalty to Queen and Country; another eye roll. A vaguely menacing and yet unspecified threat to her position at Barts; the largest and most aggressive eye roll yet. The grudgingly given offer of a minor favour from the British government (to be named later); a 'do I look stupid' head tilt that would have made Sherlock proud. And finally, a bitterly conceded agreement to update Molly once a week with a simple "yes" or "no" answer to the unspoken question of "Is Sherlock still alive?", which is how Molly found herself assisting Herbert West for the next twenty-nine and a half days.

Mycroft—or someone working for him—arranged for an extended leave of absence from her job, no questions asked. Toby was handed off to a junior government employee who had sworn to keep her cat fed and cuddled under the threat of Anthea's wrath. Meanwhile Molly was moved into the instillation. She absolutely refused to sleep in the underground quarters that had been assigned to her, and was given a smaller room in the back of the farmhouse.

Herbert—ever reluctant to leave the safety of the bunker—rarely ventured up to the house and never stepped foot outside the building.

"Moriarty has people everywhere." Herbert looked over his shoulder, as if saying his name might accidentally summon the man. "You don't understand what he's done. It was too much."

If Herbert thought it was too much, it must have been something truly horrific.

"He insisted on bringing Moran back, but he wouldn't let me reattach the head first. He make Moran carry it around in a box. Halsey's loose, did you hear about that? Moriarty took me back to the States when he broke Halsey out of Arkham. People we knew from Miskatonic worked there. Halsey ripped them apart on his way out, and Moriarty . . . helped. I can still hear him laughing as he pulled an orderly's tongue from her mouth. I think he ate it, Molly."

இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—

"Jesus," Sherlock muttered under his breath.

That was excessively brutal, even for Moriarty. The man Sherlock remembered had exhibited momentary bursts of mania, but Sherlock had never discovered any evidence to suggest Moriarty done something like that before. He definitely did not murder people with his own bare hands, much less eat their flesh.

She nodded. "I know."

இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—

Molly had made it crystal clear that first afternoon, to both Mycroft and Herbert, that she had no qualms about walking if their project even looked like there was a chance in hell of producing another cannibalistic zombie creature thing. She'd packed up her life and ran on a moment's notice before, she wouldn't hesitate to do it again. Mycroft's 'minor' influence with the British Government none withstanding.

"I assure you, Molly. That is not my intention at all. I've taken every precaution to avoid that very thing." Herbert led her to one of his lab spaces. There was a series of small aquariums lined up on low tables along the back wall. Each aquarium held a decapitated human head. Some of them were clearly inanimate, truly dead; but the others . . . they watched her with blood shot eyes from the moment she entered the room.

Herbert handed her a file folder. "Notes regarding the current round of test subjects." He sighed as he looked at the pile of loose papers and the computer on a desk near the door. "I've been trying to reconstruct my research from memory. Unfortunately, all of my work from the last few years was destroyed when I left Moriarty's employ."

Molly smirked despite the seriousness of the situation. "Did a middle of the night runner, did you?"

"Something like that." Herbert smiled in return, and for just a moment it was almost as if they were back at Miskatonic.

She forced herself to look away, reminding herself of all the horrible things they'd done since. She flipped open the folder to find page after page worth of entries in his tiny, cramped handwriting.

"Save me some time. What am I looking at? And, more importantly, what are we doing here?"

"In exchange for assisting in my extraction from Moriarty's organization, the government wants exclusive access to the reanimation process. With the stipulation that I manage to correct the issue of the homicidal cannibal side-effect before any products of my research leaves this instillation."

Molly huffed as she moved toward the aquariums to take a closer look. "Yeah, I could see why they might want to avoid that."

"That was actually my condition."

She looked up, surprised.

"I'm not a complete monster. Not anymore." Herbert titled his head and watched her, as if daring her to disagree. When she remained silent, he joined her at the aquariums. "I've had to make do with this little set up. If you remember, I had had success in reanimation dismembered limbs as early as Louth. Muscle spasms, reactions to outside stimulus, that sort of thing. What I had not realized at the time, was that the various parts remained connected with some form of innate recognition that was observable when the limb was in close proximity to the functioning brain. Perhaps a reaction on the cellular level?"

"I'm sorry?" What he was describing sounded like the plot of a gothic horror story. All it was missing was a foreboding castle and a stormy night.

"I know it seems ludicrous, but it became apparent after Sebastian Moran was reanimated. I had fully expected the head to be self-aware; we had seen similar, if limited, results before. But the body . . . That was truly unexpected."

She set the folder down on the table and turned her full attention to him. "How so?"

"I didn't administer the serum to the body until we were in one of Moriarty's warehouses. He had me take Moran's head to my lab immediately, so we left the body in car initially. As I said, Moran came to immediately and was able to communicate and think. Highly aggressive, but with a modicum of self-control, unlike the earlier experiments. Left alone, Moran was physically unable to do more than snap his teeth in my direction and roll back and forth; but I tossed him into a small box so that he only glare at me from above the rim, rendered him completely ineffectual other than the continued threats he hurled in my direction. That was until the body was brought in and the serum was administered."

On the one hand, her scientific curiosity was begging to know what happened next. On the other, nothing good ever came from Herbert looked as animated as he currently was. "And then?"

"At first it was the usual, twitches and spasms. It flailed and appeared as if it were trying to sit up but it couldn't manage such a simple action. Moriarty was disappointed. I admit that after Moriarty's extraordinary results, I was also a little dissatisfied. I heard muttering from Moran's box. And that's when the body sat up and slid from the exam table. Its movements were jerky but coordinated enough to propel it into motion. Within seconds, even without the benefit of sight or hearing, it stumbled across the floor straight toward me with outstretched arms. It had its hands around my neck—and I distinctly heard the head yelling "Do it! Kill him!" from its box, as those hand began to tighten and cut off my airway—when Moriarty calmly said, "Stop, Seb."

Molly frowned. "Are you telling me that Moran could control his body from across the room?"

"I am. Even more interesting, Moriarty walked over to the head and gave it a pat. 'That's a good boy. Let go of the Doctor. I'm not done playing with him yet.' The body lowered its arms and backed away with much more grace than before. Moran continued to maliciously eye me over the rim of his box, but he had grown quiet as soon as Moriarty had ordered him to desist."

Herbert nodded toward the heads. "That's what gave me the idea of using the fish tanks. They test subjects still observable, and within reach if needed, but they aren't going to roll off to nip at my heels when I'm not looking. We've just had to make sure the bodies are kept well away. Through experimentation, we realized that Moran's mental control over his own body only worked within a certain distance. Take the body far enough away and it was a stumbling mess that could be guided around without exhibiting any of the signs of aggression that were common to our earlier reanimations. Moran had no influence over any other corpses. We . . . tried several others, before Moriarty was satisfied on that account."

Molly leaned her bum against the table. "But how did Moriarty stop him, though? Was it some memory of Moriarty's authority over him that had Moran deferring, even in death? Halsey never responded to commands like that."

"Oh, but he did. Just not for us."

Her eye's widened in surprise. "Moriarty?"

Herbert nodded. "I don't know how, but the others listen to him. The other reanimated. They follow his commands like good little soldiers. And if they please him, he lets them off the chain to do what they want."

Her blood ran cold. "How many of them are there, Herbert?" Molly eyed the trash bin next to the desk because the urge to vomit was beginning to build.

"Halsey, Moran . . . a few others. Nine total, counting Moriarty."

She dove across the room and reached the bin just in time. Once she was able to lift her head, he was standing at her side with a clean towel in hand. "There's a sink down the hall if you want to wash your mouth out."

"You unleashed a small army of the undead on the world, led by an unstable madman with the money and resources to rival the government of a small country! How can you sleep at night?"

Herbert stomped away, visibly annoyed. "I didn't do it on my own, did I? Your hands are dirty, too, Molly. Don't forget that."

He was right. The wave of guilt had her leaning over the bin once more.

இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—

"No, Molly." Sherlock took her by the shoulders and pushed her away just far enough that he could look her in the eye. "You are nothing like West. You did what you did because you wanted to help people, you wanted to save your father. West did it because he could. He didn't care who got hurt in the process."

She shook her head. "I should have stopped him. The first one was . . . I thought it was an accident. The barn fire happened so quickly, I wasn't with it long enough to understand what was happening, so I didn't recognize what we'd created. But I should have known."

"If it hadn't been you, he would have found someone else to help him." He needed Molly to understand that West had appealed to her kind-hearted nature and used her.

"But it was me!"

இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—

Herbert had chosen to focus his current research on the decapitated heads. The better to measure aggression levels, and potency without the risk of another murderous rampage.

In addition to refining the reanimation process, they were also looking for the most efficient way to dispatch the formerly dead bodies. They already knew dismemberment wasn't terribly effective. A bullet to the brain had taken down the drifter, but Moriarty had been shot in the head prior to reanimation and that hadn't seemed to bother him at all. The body from the barn in Massachusetts did eventually succumb to damage from the fire; but not before it escaped the burning barn, roamed the countryside, murdered some livestock, and tried to return to its grave.

When she had asked Herbert how he knew that, he explained that Moriarty had tracked the creature down in the hopes of adding it to his merry band of reanimated psychopaths. Unfortunately—or very fortunately, depending on how you looked at it—all he had found was records from the city detailing the discovery of a badly burned body weeks after the barn had burnt to the ground.

"So, brain trauma works some of the time. Fire works, eventually." Molly followed him down the hall. They were expecting a new shipment of specimens to be brought in: Herbert didn't like to let anyone other than Molly into his work spaces, so a room near the lift had been set up as a drop off point. Boxes and coolers from various teaching hospitals and morgues containing specimens that had been treated with Herbert's special embalming fluid were routinely delivered there. Herbert would sort through everything, take what he was most interested in, and store the rest in cooling units until needed.

"Burning them to a crisp puts them down pretty quickly," he corrected her. "You just have to make sure you get the flames hot enough and keep them contained long enough."

"Starvation?" She stepped out of the way to let Jenkins push a handcart into the drop off room.

Jenkins unload the boxes as Herbert shook his head. "Does nothing. Consider that the heads in the aquariums have no means of digestion. They will bite and chew if you feed them, but they don't appear to require sustenance to survive. Moriarty eats, he obviously feels hunger, but I think it's purely a psychosomatic desire more than a physical need."

Herbert waited for Jenkins to leave, standing just outside the door to watch the other man step into the lift. He didn't move until they could hear the electrical hum of machine ascending.

"I have a theory about Moriarty's head injury." Molly let Herbert move past her so he could open the boxes to sort through. He preferred to do it himself, and she simply didn't care enough to argue with him about it. She leaned her back against the door frame, with her hands tucked behind her bum, while she waited for him to pick one or two to work with.

"I'm listening." He looked into the box on top of the pile and grimaced. "They waited too long to preserve this one. Remind me to have them put it to the incinerator tonight."

The ancient incinerator unit was in the bunker. Running it would usually require one of the personnel upstairs to come down, baby the temperamental thing until it fired up, keep a careful watch over the equally temperamental fuel regulator, and practically hover with a hand over the pull lever to manually set off the only-slightly-less-ancient fire suppression system on the off chance the unit decided to throw a wobbly and set the instillation on fire. Apparently when your operation was completely off the books and funded through a series of dodgy transactions, updating the plumbing, boiler, and gas line to an underground bunker wasn't a high priority. Or so Meghan—maker of one of the best peach cobblers Molly had ever tasted—told her over supper one night.

No one liked being roped into running the incinerator; and, of course, Herbert considered such manual labour to be beneath him. Molly sighed and resolved to do it later, rather than bothering someone upstairs.

"He was injected with your window cleaner-"

"Embalming serum." He glared at her over his shoulder as he cut open another box.

"Whatever you want to call it. You injected it almost immediately, while he was still on the roof, stopping decomp and any further loss of brain matter. What if, at the point of reanimation, the brain compensated for the damage it had already sustained? Whereas, the drifter was shot well after the reanimation process was complete." She bit her lower lip as she waited for his reaction.

Herbert stopped and stared at the wall as he considered her suggestion for a long moment. "It's a possibility. We'll need to figure out a way to test your theory. I wonder what would happen if we injected the serum into a live specimen?"

"No!" Just when she was beginning to think that he might have actually learned something over the years. "Damn it, Herbert. You promised no more . . . We're supposed to be figuring out how to stop these things."

"That's only part of why we're down here, or did you forget? The people your friend works for want me to perfect the serum just as badly as Moriarty did. And I wasn't actually going to use it on a living specimen." Molly thought she heard him mutter under his breath, "Not a human one, at any rate."

He returned his attention to opening the next box, then turned pale as a sheet as he looked down into it. Before she could ask him what was wrong, she heard the soft ping of the door to the lift opening again, which surprised her because it had only been a few minutes since Jenkins went up and they weren't expecting anyone else.

Herbert dropped the box that had been in his hands. A head rolled out of it when it hit the floor, which wasn't unexpected considering. It opened its eyes and focused on Herbert, which was unexpected enough that Molly froze in place. "Found you, West," the head snarled.

"Moran!" Herbert reacted before her, jumping over the laughing head and grabbed her hand to drag her into the corridor. "Run!"

She let him pull her along, her eyes still trained on the thing on the floor that had begun to yell, "You can run, but you can't hide anymore!"

Suddenly, Herbert stopped dead, and she ran into his back.

"Hello, Herbie. You've been a very bad boy."

Molly's blood froze in her veins as she recognized that voice. She peeked around Herbert's arm and tried not to gag at the sight of Jim Moriarty standing at the front of a group of seven others. He was holding a hand that ended in a stump at the wrist. Two of the others had been guiding a headless body between them, but as they moved closer the body seemed to grow more and more. She realized it must have belong to the decapitated head in the room behind them. On Jim's right was Dr Halsey. His expression was feral, his eyes bloodshot and wide; and when they fell on her, he began to drool.

Jim waved the hand as if in a greeting, then tossed it to the side without looking. It hit the corridor wall and dropped to the ground. "I needed a hand getting down there, and that helpful chap who came out of the lift was generous enough to lend me his."

Herbert shifted and Jim finally got a good look at her. He smiled, somehow the tiniest hint of the man she'd briefly dated still managed to shine through. "Well, well, what a surprise. It's Molly! Look everyone, it's my little morgue mouse Molly. Oh. Oh! This is delicious. You're Herbie's mystery helper." He shook his head, his smile growing even wider. "I think you've just become completely replaceable, Herbie. I know what Mousy is capable of, and she is much easier on the eyes. Not a bad kisser, either." He winked at her.

She felt sick.

"Does that mean we kill him now?" came an eager question from behind them. Molly looked over her shoulder to see Moran's head roll into the hall. His body shouldered past her and Herbert, forcing Molly to back up against the wall in an attempt to avoid contact. It bent over and picked up the head, holding it by the hair at its side.

"Oh, God, we're fucked," Molly whispered as she grabbed the back of Herbert's lab coat.

"We never got that far before," Jim sing-songed. "But I'm game if you are, luv."

Herbert turned his head to look over his shoulder at Moran. His lips moved, silently mouthing words. At first, she thought he was confirming her assessment that they were well and truly fucked; but then her brain processed the actual movement of his lips. He was repeating one word over and over. "Fire."

He slid his hand behind his back, and flicked his fingers toward Moran. Or, Molly realized, more specifically toward the maze of branching corridors behind Moran. One of which dead-ended at the furnace room that housed the unstable incinerator.

Her mind raced, trying to calculate their chances of getting out of the underground instillation alive. They weren't great. Or even good. Near the furnace room there was a little used emergency exit, a set of stairs that lead up to a stone box culvert a fair distance from the house. If they could make it through the staircase door before one of Moriarty's creatures laid a hand on them . . . But there was no way they'd be able to rig the incinerator to blow, unlock the door's keypad, and make it up the stairs in time without some sort of a miracle.

Still, the odds of survival trying that were a hundred times higher than if they stayed where they were and let Moran or Halsey get a hold of them.

She reached down and grasped Herbert's hand, wrapping her fingers tightly around his to show him that she understood. Molly took a deep breath, released his hand, and yelled "Now!"

Both of them turned and ran. Molly ducked under Moran's outstretched arm, and Herbert spared a second to knock Moran's head onto the floor. They heard a thump and Halsey howl in rage. Molly assumed Moran's efforts to retrieve his head had impeded the others efforts to chase after them, but she wasn't going to stick around long enough to confirm it.

Thanks to days spent walking the complex whenever they needed a break from hunching over their work, Molly and Herbert quickly made their way to the furnace room through the shortest path possible. The sound of powerful arms and hands slamming against locked doors echoed down the halls as the others searched for them.

Herbert immediately set to work on igniting the incinerator while Molly dealt with opening the fuel valve as wide as it would go.

"We better hope Moriarty wasn't able to get the override code for the lift and stairs off of Jenkins or one of the others in the house. This will only work if we can keep them here. If they aren't close enough when it blows, it might not be enough," Herbert cautioned her.

Molly met his eyes as she continued to work. "It will have to be enough."

The smell of natural gas was strong by the time they had disabled all of the safety shut offs.

They could hear approaching footfalls and snarls when they exited the furnace room, and they both knew the reanimated creatures were close.

"Quickly, up the stairs," Herbert urged her. She pressed the passcode into the keypad with shaking fingers, terrified that she'd get it wrong and waste precious seconds. The lock disengaged just as Halsey rounded the last corner and yelled in triumph.

Herbert shoved her through the door and pulled it closed behind her. She heard the lock engage. Molly turned to look through the small window, her hand hovering over the keypad on her side. She wanted to open the door and scream at him to come with her; but Herbert was already backing toward the furnace room, waving his arms and calling out to Halsey to draw his attention away from the stairs.

He shook his head as he pressed against the wall next to the furnace room. She couldn't hear him speak, but this time she had no trouble reading his lips.

"Run."

Still, Molly hesitated, torn between escaping and trying to help the man she'd known and worked with for so long. He was a horrible person, but he didn't deserve to die like that. No one did.

Herbert opened his arms wide, as if to embrace the madmen who descended upon him with foaming mouths and hands curled into claws. After a long moment, she could no longer see him, buried as he was beneath a mound of unspeakable howling horrors.

In contrast to the rapid, ravenous movements of the other monsters, Moriarty moved with graceful, deliberate steps. As he approached, he pulled a small black case from the inside pocket of his jacket and opened it to remove a syringe filled with the familiar glowing green fluid. She saw him lift his head, nostrils flaring as if he were scenting the air. His eyes narrowed and he looked around. Molly ducked out of sight, but she was certain he'd seen her.

The incinerator was going to blow at any moment, Herbert was surely dead, and Molly had no other choice but to run.

She bound up the stairs as fast as she could, cringing as soon as she saw yet another keypad waiting at the exit to the culvert.

Molly heard the explosion before she felt the heat rushing up the stairway to lick at her back, slamming her against the door as it blew outward. The only thing that saved her, she thought in the moments before she passed out, was the rapidly moving runoff from two days' worth of solid rain. The flames crawled up the wall to cover the culvert ceiling as Molly let the current drag her away to relative safety.


	8. Part Eight - Outro

**Part Eight - Outro**

Sherlock pulled her tight against his chest, horrified at how close he'd come to losing her. "Obviously, you made it out."

"Barely." Molly wrapped her arms around his waist in response. "I ended up in hospital for nearly a month. Concussion, some minor burns considering what could have been, broke my leg and nose. Apparently, I was hysterical and had to be sedated for the first several days. Mycroft had me moved to a private facility while I recovered."

At least his brother had done something right. Sherlock was still going to murder him for putting his pathologist in danger.

"No other survivors?"

She shook her head, then changed her mind and nodded. Sherlock held his breath in anticipation of whatever horrifyingly new information she was about to dump in his lap. "Meghan and Roy were in town when it happened. Roy is the one who found me."

Molly sat up and rubbed her temples, as if the remembering and recounting of years' worth of memories was giving her a headache. "The four men on duty in the house were dead before the fire started. It took nearly a week to sort through everything. Mycroft told me most of the bodies recovered from the bunker were mangled and burned beyond recognition. They were at ground zero when the incinerator exploded, none of the corpses were intact. But he said that they recovered tissue from ten different sources; including Moran, Halsey, Jim, and Herbert."

"Mycroft told you that?" Sherlock stood and crossed the small room to the desk. He was going to have to pay a visit to his brother; he needed to observe Mycroft's face and read every muscle tic and twitch. If Mycroft had been lying to her because he had decided that Molly didn't need to know . . . His brother had no qualms about withholding formation if it suited his purposes.

"Is that everything?" _Please let that be everything_ , Sherlock thought. He wasn't sure how much more he could stomach without a cigarette to calm himself.

"Yeah. Up until-" She stopped and flicked her fingers at the desk. "That."

He bent to study the box at eye level, closely examining each side and the top in turn. The handwriting was unfamiliar; uneven lines with several stops and stops. Either they had tried to disguise their writing or manipulating the pen had been difficult.

After determining he'd deduced everything he could without taking the box to the lab for a more detailed analysis, he pulled his mobile out of his pocket. He spared a moment to readjust the sleeves of his suitcoat before pulling up the direct number to Barts security room. "Yes, hello. I need to speak with Turner. No, Robertson won't do. Tell him it's Sherlock Holmes."

He waited exactly forty-two seconds while someone explained who was calling and Turner finally took the phone. "Mr Holmes?"

Sherlock wasn't in the mood to bother with social niceties (not that he ever was, really). "I need you to check the CCTV footage for anyone coming or going from the morgue area in the last . . . How long were you up in the lab?" Molly held up three fingers. "The last three hours."

"All right, Mr Holmes. I can get to that in a few-" Turner began before Sherlock cut him off.

"Now. I'll wait."

He heard a long-suffering sigh over the phone, and then the sounds of someone typing on a computer keyboard. "Let's see. I've got Doctor Hooper heading out. Twenty minutes later I've got two nurses—one male, one female. They keep looking around, nervous like."

"He's married, she's in a committed relationship. They're meeting for their regular weekly tryst in one of the supply closets." Sherlock's tone was clipped as he quickly dismissed them.

Molly gasped, "How do you know that?" at the same time Turner asked, "How can you be so sure, you haven't even seen them?"

"Did I not just say this was a _regular_ occurrence? It's not them, keep looking." He rolled his eyes even though Turner couldn't see him.

Turner huffed. "Is there someone in particular you're looking for, Mr Holmes? Something I can use to narrow this down?"

"They'll be carrying a box when they arrive, and they'll be heading toward the morgue offices." Sherlock kept his eyes on Molly as she fidgeted. He realized it must be frustrating for her, stuck listening to a one-sided conversation.

There was nothing but the sound of Turner breathing for close to two minutes. "Yeah, I think I've got him. Guy in a delivery uniform with a decent-sized box, came through an hour ago. Got a limp. Kept his face down and was actively avoiding the security camera."

Sherlock felt his heart begin to beat faster and he straightened his spine, all attention focused on the details Turner was feeding him.

"He left eight minutes later, without the box. Oh, that's odd."

"What?" Sherlock turned away so that his back was to Molly, he needed to concentrate and he couldn't do that while she was looking at him with those wide, scared eyes. "What is it?"

"He stopped and looked right up at the camera this time. Just looked up, smiled, and waved. Half his face is all scarred up, like . . . like some of those poor people up in the burn ward."

Sherlock swallowed hard. He lowered his voice to a whisper, hoping against hope that Molly wouldn't hear his next question. "Turner, do you recognize him? Have you seen him before, perhaps without the scars?"

Another short silence while the other man must have been studying the image on the screen. "Yeah. Yeah, it's that 'Miss Me?' guy. What's his name? But what the hell happened to him? Did he get caught in a fire or something?"

"Something like that." Sherlock disconnected without another word.

When he turned back Molly was standing on the other side of the desk, nervously twisting her hands together. "What did he say? Is it someone we know?"

"Moriarty."

She looked as if she were about to faint. Her head dropped as she took several deep breaths and put her hands on the desk to steady herself. Sherlock came across to her side, prepared to catch her if she fell. After a moment, Molly lifted her head and glared at the box. "We need to open it. I need to know what the hell is in there."

Her hands trembled as she reached for it, but Sherlock took hold of them and pulled them away. "I'll do it."

He had only just begun to pick at the packing tape that sealed the box shut when something thumped and a voice rasped from inside, "Moollllyyy."

She paled and grabbed Sherlock's hand, her nails digging into his skin.

"Herbert?"

 ***Fade to Black***


End file.
